Overwhelmed.

I'm pretty sure I'm officially overwhelmed right now.

When I was pregnant with Sabrina, I couldn't do anything. I wasn't even allowed to walk. I was to be laying down, on my side, 95% of the time. That other 5% I got to go to the bathroom, take a shower, make a quick lunch (or grab a handful of Twix bars) and that's about it. With this one, I haven't had to make many changes and I've taken full advantage. Maybe too much.

You know you're overwhelmed when you look at your Google Reader and the fact that you have so many unread blog posts seriously starts stressing you out. I came thisclose to putting it on my daily to-do list: "read and comment on blogs". With my own blog, I wanted to post about the great time we had at the fair...I've had no time to do that. Between trying to start and finish projects for work before I go out on maternity leave (in 4 weeks, people! 4 weeks!), dealing with Sabrina's Early Intervention evaluation and follow up for speech therapy (see, I haven't even had time to tell you about that!), trying to get stuff ready for the new addition, and oh, taking on what seems like every home renovation project we possibly could now when I'm 8 months pregnant and not, you know, last summer when I wasn't...I'm overwhelmed. There's too much to do. Plus I feel like shit and I'm extra cranky. It's not a great combo.

Remember the raccoons? They never went away completely. And, unbeknownst to us, they were living under our "deck". Which was quite amazing because as far as we could tell, it was built flush to the ground against concrete - there was no way under there. Ah, but had we checked all four sides we would have noticed there was a perfect entry for the horrid animals. But we didn't check that, until I was out with Sabrina playing in her kiddie pool when I heard the grunting and growling coming from under the deck, then saw a raccoons tail shoot out from one of the holes. Oh, and raccoon babies crying. Wonderful. Middle of the day, I have angry raccoons within a couple feet of my toddler. Now they had to go. Personally I would have shot them if I could have (sorry PETA, if you'd like to live at my house with raccoons, feel free) but apparently you aren't allowed to shoot guns in residential areas (who knew?) and I didn't want to have my baby in prison so I went the other route. Which entailed paying a fortune to some guy to come and trap the raccoon(s) and take them far, far away. Raccoons have a lot of rights in California. I'm pretty sure it would be easier (and cheaper) to hire someone to kill a person.

Anyway, raccoons are gone. But not for long if we kept that deck as it was a perfect den. It wouldn't be the same family, but another one would take their place quickly. So the deck had to go. Chris and I ripped the deck out, and then sat and looked at this:

See that in the far corner? The hole? That was the deck. Now it's a hole. A stinky hole because the raccoons shit in their little home for who knows how long. Probably long before we bought the house. Does that look like a safe environment for a toddler? No, not really.

So we think a concrete slab is the way to go. Fast, hopefully affordable, easy. No, none of the above. Ridiculous prices because it's a more involved project than it looks like. Okay, so we'll do it ourselves and do pavers. The price for the rock, sand, pavers, etc. would be ridiculous. I'm having nightmares about pavers. Now we don't know what to do with that area. Hire someone to put in pavers? They'd be cheaper than the price we got from our local materials place. Put down a tarp and some hazard tape?

This homeowner shit is for the birds.

And don't even get me started on the chair rail incident of 2010.